Transcription
In my life, to give another example, the mongers would have twice the assets they now have if I hadn't made one mistake of omission back in the 1970s. And really stupid, and I got—I blew an opportunity—would have doubled my present worth. That is a normal life; you get one or two, and how things work out. Bas, we all know people that are out-married—I mean, their spouses are so much better. Think what a good decision that was for them and what a lucky decision. Way more important than money, and a lot of them did it when they were young; just they stumbled into it. Now you don't have to stumble into it; you can be very careful. A lot of people are wearing signs: Danger! Danger! Do not touch! And people just charge right ahead. That's a mistake. Well, you can laugh, but it's still a horrible mistake.
I tell a couple other stories too, cuz you like stories. Here's an apocryphal story that is very instructive. A young man comes to visit Mozart, and he says, "Mozart," he says, "I want to write symphonies." And Mozart says, "How old are you?" And the man: 23. Mozart says, "You're too young to write symphonies." He says, "But Mozart," he says, "you were writing symphonies when you were 10 years old." Mozart says, "Yes, but I wasn't asking other people how to do it."
Now there's another Mozart story. Here's the greatest musical talent maybe that ever lived, and what was his life like? Well, he was bitterly unhappy, and he died young. That's the life of Mozart. What the hell did Mozart do to screw it up, make himself—well, he did two things that are guaranteed to create a lot of misery: He overspent his income scrupulously. That's number one; that is really stupid. And the other thing was he was full of jealousies and resentments. If you'll spend—overspend your income and be full of jealousy and resentments, you can have a lousy, unhappy life and die young. All you got to do is learn from Mozart. You can also learn from that young man who was asking Mozart how to write symphonies. The truth of the matter is that not everybody can learn everything. Some people are way the hell better, and of course, no matter how hard you try, there's always some guy that achieves more, some guy or gal. And my answer is: So what? Does any of us need to be the very top of the whole world? It's ridiculous.
Another thing that people do, like Gard—the amazing—is they build these enormous mausoleums. I think they figure they want people to walk by that mausoleum and say, "Gosh, I wish I were in there." Anyway, you can see we've had some fun as we go along, and it worked so well. But if you actually figure out how many decisions were made in the history of The Daily Journal Corporation or the history of Berkshire Hathaway, it wasn't very many per year that were meaningful. It's a game of being there all the time and recognizing the rare opportunity when it comes and recognizing that a normal human allotment is to not have very many.
Now there's a very competent bunch of people who sell securities who act as though they've got an endless supply of wonderful opportunity. Those people are the equivalent of the racetrack tout; they're not even respectable. It's not a good way to live your life to pretend to know a lot of stuff you don't know and pretend to furnish you a lot of opportunities you're not furnishing. And my advice to you is avoid those people. But not if you're running a stock brokerage firm; you need them. But it's not the right way to make money. And and and this business of of controlling the costs and living simply—and that was the secret. How much? Warren and I had tiny little bits of money; we always underspend our incomes, and we invested, and we—well, you know, if you live long enough, you end up rich. It's not very complicated.
Now there is a part of life which is: How do you scramble out of your mistakes without them costing too much? And we've done some of that too. And if you look at Berkshire Hathaway, think of its founding businesses: A doomed department store, a doomed New England textile company, and a doomed trading stamp company. Out of that came Berkshire Hathaway. Now we handled those losing hands pretty well, and we bought into them very cheaply. But of course, the success came from changing our ways and getting into the better businesses. And it isn't that we were so good at doing things that were difficult; we were good at avoiding things that were difficult, finding things that are easy. By the way, when we bought The Daily Journal, that was easy. What we're doing now in this software business is difficult. But due to the accident of these good associations and the fact that these old colleagues have lived so long, we're doing pretty well in the new business. It has potential, and it's fun to do. And uh—how many declining newspapers have hundreds of millions of marketable securities lying around and a new business with some promise? We're like the last of the Mohicans.